When Bruce Springsteen stands on stage, staring into the crowd, or with his head bowed, holding his guitar behind him, the pose is now as iconic as a young Abraham Lincoln with an axe on his shoulder. It’s a mythical image of American nobility. In “Road Diaries: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band,” we follow Springsteen, in his first concerts since the pandemic, as he reconnects with his legendary band, rehearses for six days, and heads out on a tour that will take them from the United States to Europe, from 2023 to 2024.
All of this is interspersed with grainy footage of Bruce performing in the 1970s and early 1980s. By this point, we've become so accustomed to an older, more flamboyant Bruce that when we watch some of the earlier clips, we're almost shocked to realize how much he moved on stage. He was thrown In a crazy, flamboyant way. The documentary notes that the main reason he recruited his friend Steven Van Zandt to be the band's guitarist was so he – Bruce – could free himself from having to carry a guitar. Bruce, in his prime, loved to dance.
Bruce doesn’t move that way anymore. But at 74, he’s a byword for hard-earned strength, his youthful grimness evolving into a kind of strength and bulk. He now looks like Robert De Niro with a touch of Ben Affleck; his face, from certain angles, looks like something you might see on the side of a silver dollar. Yet he’s as stubborn and energetic as ever.
Now that Springsteen and the E Street Band, the musical brothers he played with for half a century, are in their golden years, the meaning of what they do has changed. voice The E Street Band is a wonderful, distinctive band. It is never dull, never wobbly, never slow, never slow. Yet the man who leads the band has always had a desire to share his own song, which means Bruce now sings in a way that is timeless but also acknowledges time. There are moments when he sings about the darkness on the brink of death.
But only moments. What you hear on “Road Diaries” is the life force of Springsteen as an artist. He plays a number of new songs, but the fact that he’s been playing old songs for ages only adds to their greatness. I was blown away when Bruce unleashed his guitar solo on “Prove It All Night Long,” a song from 1978. Back then, when you went to a Springsteen show, a lot of the mania—the ecstatic screams that Springsteen would make during his set—would disappear in a flash. “Broooooss!!!” The audience, immersed in the music for more than three hours, bonded over the feeling that Springsteen was, in a sense, the last of the classic rock stars. His music was middle-of-the-road.
Now, when I hear the guitar solo in all its fury, and watch Bruce contort his face to play it at full force, it sounds like it is: a shape that has faded from the center. Yet the solo seems to say that as long as Springsteen can take the guitar and make it sound like thisIt's rock 'n' roll that comes alive. It's music that transcends nostalgia.
“Road Diaries” opens with Bruce back in the band, and I have to say: they’re a mutually admiring community (and there’s nothing wrong with that). They have a sense of drama about refining their sound back into a midseason form that seems a bit overdone. True, they haven’t played together in six years. The film’s director, Tom Zimny (who, with Bruce, directed the intimate 2019 Springsteen performance documentary “Stars of the West”) interviews each of them, and when they talk about how slow the songs were at first, we think, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll get the hang of it.” There are now nostalgia rock tours where bands haven’t played together in 30 years. The E Street Band, even from their first “rough” rehearsals, sound like a well-oiled machine, and they know these songs in their bones. Bruce, if anything, has become more polished and organized. He’s putting together a 25-song setlist, which adds up to a story he’s telling—about past and present, about youth and age—that’s as precise in its meaning as a novel.
Of course, a music documentary should celebrate its subject. I’ve never seen one that didn’t. But in “The Road Diaries,” there’s a tremendous amount of fervent celebration. Bruce talks about how much he loved the band, how great the guys were, how great the extras (the jazz/funk band, the soul choir, and percussionist Anthony Almonte) were, and they all talk about how much they loved Bruce, and how miraculous it is that they’re all still able to do this after fifty years. I don’t doubt a word of it, but the 99-minute film doesn’t need to remind us of that. Springsteen is such a fine artist that it doesn’t take a music documentary about him to make its positivity feel like a commercial, and this one does that sometimes.
But we can forgive that. These guys (and the girls, especially Springsteen’s wife of 33 years, Patti Scalfa, who reveals in the film that she was diagnosed with early-stage multiple myeloma) have earned the right to praise their longevity and the joy they inspire in each other. Their acknowledgment of the loss of band members Danny Federici and the great Clarence Clemens (replaced by his nephew Jake Clemens, who does a fine job but can conjure up half the voice Clarence did) is poignant and moving. (Onstage during the tour, Bruce sang the Commodores’ “Night Shift” in their honor. It became one of the most moving songs of the show.)
Their evocation of the younger Bruce, who would have the band dance for hours while he surveyed every corner of the arena, tells you a lot about him. So do the stories of the band’s early touring days, or what it was like to hear Sam and Dave in a club in the early ’60s. More than ever, you hear how much of the E Street Band’s soulful DNA is embedded in their sound. Ultimately, Bruce, speaking to us in his own voice, says he plans to keep playing concerts “until the wheels fail.” Watching Road Diaries , you hope they never do that.
